Ever needed to hammer in a nail one-handed? Without a nailgun, it's almost impossible, but this cool German hammer has been designed to make it easy to do that—and it's so clever, you'll wonder why they bother designing hammers any other way.
It's called a Latthammer, or a German carpenter's roofing hammer. It features a square head for greater precision, and a fiddler-crab-like claw for making it easier to pry up nails. But what's really smart about the Latthammer is the cross-shaped groove at the top of the hammer, which works as a sort of one-hand nail guidance system to make this possible:
The Latthammer works by holding the nail in place in the groove with a powerful magnet. You just hit the hammer once to fix the nail into a piece of wood, then hit the nail again to drive it in. It's designed to make it simple for roofers to hammer nails overhead, but it's not hard to imagine how useful this would be at home. Think of all the bruised thumbnails you could save!
The Latthammer is designed by Picard, a 160-year-old German hammer company. Sadly, Latthammers don't seem to be available at an affordable price in the United States: on Amazon, they cost $165 apiece.
[via Core77]